The bursting of the educational bubble: the mother of battles in defense of face-to-face education

Luis Bonilla-Molina

Context

Educational institutions (primary, secondary, university) were modeled and reconfigured according to the requirements of the capitalist system of the first and second industrial revolutions. The machine of assembled parts and components, working in a complementary way  to produce movement, was not only the epistemological paradigm of the functioning of society and the mode of production, but also the premise that guided capitalism in educational matters, during the first two cycles of industrial revolutions.

The perspective of Comenius (1592-1670), became universal and prevailed when structuring schooling in industrial capitalist society. Comenius had taken into account for his work, both the Greek experience and the educational system of the Roman Empire; Consequently, he proposed an educational model based on systematic and stepped effort, structured by cycles associated with ages. In chapter XXVII of Didactica Magna, on «the division of schools into four species according to age and achievement«, Comenius establishes a school structure made up of the nursery school, common school, Latin school and the academy, which correspond to the notions of maternal-preschool, primary, secondary and university education of the present. For Comenius, the dynamics of the teaching-learning processes was that of the interlocking of parts that become more complex in a scalar and sequential way. This corresponds to the paradigm from the simple to the complex, which ensures that graduates of school systems are ultimately able to deduce particular applications of scientific knowledge that contribute to the reproduction and specialization of the mode of production.

The industrial capitalism of the first two industrial revolutions assumes as its own the Comenius school system model and builds a common sense notion of education that has remained through time, reaching such a point of hegemony that today it is difficult to conceive another way of the school world. It is very difficult for us to imagine an educational system outside of that machine logic that assembles and complements its parts, which considers the scale and sequential parameters essential to produce useful knowledge for biopolitical reproduction.

From this logic, the pedagogical dynamics become components (pieces) that are assembled and that can be repaired separately. The didactics, evaluation, curriculum, planning and school management become parts and pedagogy an empty shell that contains them all together. This vision of the machine was leading to educational experiments that were expressed in didacticism, managerialism, evaluative, curricular and planning approaches,  which were based on considering  each one of the “pieces” as the center of the pedagogical. The educational reforms (curricular, evaluative, didactic, management, planning, separately) were the narrative that expressed the autonomization and preponderance of one process over the others, but also evidenced the growing depedagogization of education.  Although the autonomization of the parts breaks with the assembly logic and generates chaos, it resullts functional for the commercialization and privatization of education.

These dynamics permeated the common sense of an important part of the educational resistance to the hegemonic model of capital. Most of the alternative proposals are made from one of the fields and are wrongly presented as pedagogical proposals in a general sense. Thus we see, for example, the obsession with the curricular in the field of resistance, fundamentally in the field of content, as if a “new fuel” made possible the different functioning of the school machine; reminiscences of a medieval metaphysical thought that considered that if the «pagans» had their sacred texts changed by the Bible, this act would produce a «new man» (a notion, moreover, misogynistic and patriarchal). Likewise, efforts to produce an anti-authoritarian evaluative praxis end up being unable to break with the prescribed curriculum (even «alternative»), or models of democratic management in schools underestimate the impact of reproductive didactic proposals.

The disciplinary orientation and the in-depth knowledge between all parts of the whole, transversed the capitalist educational machine; This is how we saw the birth and sustained  development over time of subjects and then fields of learning, the sequential and scalar objectives, the correlations of objectives. Knowledge in segments labeled as disciplines, assembled as part of a school whole, contained the capitalist illusion that these served to «discover» new components and pieces that would allow increasing the volume of production of goods, deepening exploitation and surplus value, as well as multiplying the possibilities of knowledge for market purposes.

These processes were useful in the logic of the first two industrial revolutions and for the needs of the capitalist mode of production at that historical time. However, new needs arise with the advent of the third industrial revolution [1]. Transdisciplinarity and complex thinking become requirements of the capitalist mode of production of the third industrial revolution. The disciplinary model is increasingly inefficient, by itself, for the cognitive reproduction of the system, in the midst of a growing acceleration of innovation, derived from the transdisciplinary crossing of knowledge.

The capitalist mode of production is impacted by the acceleration of innovation and also by the digital-virtual world whichbegins to take shape in its educational possibilities. The applied field of computer science demands not only cross-disciplinary knowledge, but complex thinking. This generates tensions not known until now by the school systems that translate into a siege of the school world, which, in the absence of a Comenius (individual or collective) of the late twentieth century, does not find the narrative keys to express the new reality. This lack unleashes a tower of babel of interpretations about the new education that the capitalist mode of production requires; Coleman, Fauré, Delors, Morín, unsuccessfully try to build a narrative to guide educational change.

The tradition of contrasting the disciplinary versus the transdisciplinary, the latter as a place of enunciation of the anti-system educational criticism, was insufficient in the third industrial revolution to understand and act in the new, becoming a discourse that operated as a smokescreen, preventing understanding what was happening. The resistance was weakened in its epistemological, political and pragmatic efficacy and incapacitated to propose a radical and structural change with respect to the Commenian school model [2].

Even the Soviet experience galloped on the school machine built by the industrial capitalism of the first two industrial revolutions. The so-called Russian socialism entered the epistemology of this machine and launched didactic, curricular, evaluative and management proposals that were incorporated as novel parts to the structure of the educational machine. This consolidated the one-dimensional way of understanding the school and established the common sense of the functional structure of educational systems. A phenomenon that can be explained by the development of Marxist thought at that historical moment, which poses a gigantic challenge for those of us who today vindicate ourselves in this field.

The works of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) constitute an important effort to break with the common sense of society that hides the capitalist ideological machine. The Deleuzian notions of «difference» and «repetition» (1968) allow us to better understand and explain the fragmentation of the pedagogical field to guarantee the uniformity of the social being, what some call the graduation profile. Likewise, his pioneering work on «multiplicity«, «event» and «virtuality» (1969), as well as the devastating criticism of the capitalist machine in «Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1968), opened a debate that critical pedagogies did not know how to take advantage of, even from the difference, to generate a break with the unique way of understanding school.

Having built a social and pedagogical common sense of the school as an educational machine of assembled and staggered parts, the requirement transdisciplinary was seen as a new piece that should cut through all the components of the old machine. It was like driving a rod through the gearbox of a slow-moving car. It was not possible for the apologists of cognitive capitalism or for critical thinking to think of a school and university different from the model established in the first two industrial revolutions, even taking advantage of the unofficial arrival of transdisciplinarity. Everyone began to speak of transdisciplinarity, but the transdisciplinary educational institutions that capitalism required in the third industrial revolution and that had longed for the antisystemic resistance in the first two industrial revolutions did not emerge. Common sense built from repetition operated as a conservative spirit that did not allow the new to emerge.

This resulted in the rise of the notion of «educational crisis«, which was nothing other than the expression of dissatisfaction of the capitalist mode of production in the face of the impossibility of the emergence of a new educational machine. The idea of ​​an educational crisis released the demons of commodification and privatization more interested in gain and profit than in building transdisciplinary educational institutions; These dynamics were limited to reproducing the old model of educational institutions, but with high costs for access and permanence. From the resistances, the defensive action against the privatization and commercialization models left in the background the construction of institutional proposals that broke with the logic of the disciplinary educational machine of the first two industrial revolutions. Many statements of resistance became empty signifiers, in pamphlet expressions that did not make way for a new educational model of an anti-capitalist character.

From the sixties of the 20th century to the second decade of the 21st century, initiatives to standardize educational processes and the imposition of order in incessant repetition were seen as the possibility of imposing the expected change in a synchronized way. But, while the new educational machine did not finish emerging, standardized test results were shown that presented school systems as inefficient, a situation that was increasingly moving away from being a requirement to facilitate the imposition of what did not arrive and became a global action to destroy face-to-face educational institutions.

In 2011, the fourth industrial revolution was announced in Hanover, Germany, which implied a new impact on the mode of production and, consequently, new demands on educational systems. Virtual reality and the digital world begin to invade the daily lives of human beings throughout the world, while scenarios of factories 4.0 are being modeled. Now, besides the requirement of transdisciplinarity and educational complexity, the capitalist mode of production adds the requirements of fuzzy logic and open learning with incessant change in real time. If school common sense operated like a conservative wall and we had difficulties to understand how to build the new in the third industrial revolution, now what is demanded sounds to the ears of the teaching community as if it were a science fiction narrative.

Big data, metadata analysis, artificial intelligence, the chain of blocks of the Blockchain, the metaverse in its educational possibilities, pose to the cognitive capitalism of the XXI century the need to calculate costs and profits on the permanence or not of face-to-face school systems. The experience on a planetary scale, during the COVID-19 pandemic, has made millions of human beings experience virtuality and the digital world in education. The profits of 3.2 trillion dollars obtained during the year 2020 by the eleven most important technological corporations confirm that the bimodal experiment (presence + virtuality) or homeschooling is another way of educating for the biopolitical reproduction of the system.

Capitalism requires resignifying the ideas of consumption, sociability, citizenship, participation, training for employment, as well as the democratization of scientific and technological knowledge that characterized the face-to-face school / university during the first two industrial revolutions. For this purpose, the school systems (schools, high schools and universities) are of little use to it, due to the epistemic gap that characterizes them and because of their inability to react creatively to the acceleration of innovation. The old educational machine of the first and second industrial revolutions appears obsolete for the purposes of big capital at the same time that the popular field demands its transformation; the concerns of both sectors are different and with a distant teleology.

For this reason, cognitive capitalism prefers to bet on the cultural industrial complex for biopolitical reproduction (consumption, citizenship, science for the market, individualism). In fact, today social networks, cinema, video games, video clips, music companies seem to be much more efficient than school systems for building consumerism mentality and shape tastes, enjoyment and luxury. Lipovetsky (1990) goes much further by stating in «The Empire of the Ephemeral» that the democratization of luxury acts as an orientation of mass consumption and a form of reappropriation of the surplus.

Just as in Harvey’s (2006) text, “Paris, capital of modernity”, the disembarkation of capitalist modernity is masterfully described, today we require analysis on the branches that industrial revolutions generate in capitalism itself in order to understand what it’s happening. Institutions are reconfigured, a new centrality of home emerges in production, consumption and reproduction, the city begins to lose prominence in the face of rural areas. In this context, it is difficult for education and school systems in charge of cultural reproduction for decades to break with routine dynamics and give birth to a new educational machine.

The digital and virtual worlds progressively assume prominence in spheres that were previously typical of the school / university area. Certainly this is a feasible phenomenon, that serves to massify in the short term middle and high income populations, with much less possibilities in the popular sectors. But exclusion has not been a concern of capitalism, on the contrary, it is immanent in its nature.

The chaotic mutation of school in the absence of a new educational machine that functions with the demands of the fourth industrial revolution, begins to express itself in the attack on presentiality, in the proposals of privatizing bimodality, in the hegemony of the virtual and the digital worlds. The face-to-face educational institutions are being besieged to force the advent of the new educational machine that capital requires.

Everything indicates that the capitalist center is not going to repeat the experience of the third industrial revolution, when it left the leadership of the radical transformation of school systems in the hands of the ministries of education and they showed their inability to fulfill this task. Now, corporations are leading, inside and outside multilateralism, the offensive to model a new educational machine for the fourth industrial revolution.

The face-to-face school / university is being presented as a place of contention and for the dissipation of the social conflict of the excluded, with less capacity for the democratization of scientific knowledge and the fulfillment of biopolitical reproduction tasks. Two types of school education and four school stratifications are beginning to emerge. These two types of education are: a) face-to-face + home school + virtuality + digital and, b) classic face-to-face. What’s terrible is the acceptance, often uncritical, of the four segments of the educational population, which are expressed in students: a) with remote connection equipment + internet + support at home in the teaching-learning processes; b) with remote connection equipment + internet, without the possibility of pedagogical accompaniment at home; c) without equipment for remote connection, or internet, only with intermittent presence and theoretical approach to the virtual-digital, excluded from bimodality; c) located in hard-to-reach regions, indigenous and rural communities, for whom virtual-digital is practically science fiction, since connection equipment and the internet are not part of their daily lives or environment.

In this context, connectivity is an issue that marks the tenuous and fragile line between educational inclusion and exclusion. The right to universal and free connection is a democratic demand, not only for education, which will mark the real possibilities of citizen exercise in the fourth industrial revolution.

In that sense, there are two currents in the capitalist elite and the corporations. The first one that states that the internet must have a cost for each citizen or family, since the world of the fourth revolution will revolve around connectivity; consequently, they see the internet as a privatized public service. The second, which considers that the volume of business and profits is such, in electronic commerce and the immaterial production of goods, that it is necessary to massify access and that after creating the digital-virtual culture, it is possible to think about commercializing connectivity; Consequently, they propose bringing connectivity to all territories at zero or very low costs. Both currents are mediated by the logic of capital. In the social movement there has been a small and still marginal debate against the current, which suggests that connectivity falls into the sphere of the intersectorality of human rights.

In the first case, there are companies like Google, who through Alphabet launched the «Loon Project» in 2013.This project consisted of using balloons to guarantee access to rural and remote areas, that is, to regions that had more difficult connectivity. However, the sustainability problems of this project led to its cancellation in January 2021. The failure of Loon did not mean an abandonment of the purposes of  Bill Gates company, but on the same date they announced a new project: «Taara». In this case, Alphabet’s strategy in alliance with Liquid Intelligent Technologies [3] is based on optical wireless communications. Taara is being tested in the two republics of Congo, in Africa.

While Alphabet explores lowering prices to reach all parts of the world, internet providers in national markets prefer to take possession of local consumers, waiting for greater global expansion capabilities to emerge; This is the case of US provider companies such as Xfinity, AT&T Internet, CenturyLink, Verizon Fios, Spectrum, Frontier, Cox, Suddenlink, Sparklight, Mediacom, Windstream, WOW, Optimum, Earthlink, Rise Broadband, Consolidated Communications, TDS Telecom , Google Fiber, HughesNet and Viasat.

The connectivity market is highly competitive worldwide and what happens in the US is replicated in all nations. Therefore, Alphabet’s interest is evidently to take over  markets that today are orphaned by the backward base infrastructure (some of them, pre-first industrial revolution), since potential consumers for the society of the fourth industrial revolution live there.

In the case of the Asian giant Huawei, which has put at least one of its devices in the hands of a third of the world’s population, on May 17, 2021 it showed its Wi-Fi 6, with connectivity capacity three times greater than its predecessor. Wi-Fi 5, preparing the path of global use of its 5G technology. Huawei bets on connection speed as a strategy for more e-commerce to flow through its networks, while exploring global educational scenarios.

For its part, Facebook announced in October 2021 the change of  name of the parent company to “Meta” and the launch of the metaverse. In «The metaverse the biggest box of fools that could ever exist» [4] provide some evaluations. However, as we know more about the proposal, it becomes clear that education is one of its potential developments. Many of the physics, chemistry or biology laboratories of the world’s secondary schools, as well as  specialized laboratories of the universities, suffer the severe impact of educational disinvestment promoted by neoliberalism, having serious difficulties in being able to carry out their students in them. practices, due to the lack of equipment and materials. In the metaverse these activities aspire to be replicated with increasing effectiveness, presenting these advances in their economic dimension: a decrease in costs accompanied by effectiveness. The same could happen with areas of learning such as geography, history, literature where avatars of characters and replicas of territories would be created, generating such a level of collective perplexity that would guarantee an orderly transition to other forms of reproductive knowledge. In other words, the metaverse is a tool for the cultural reproduction of the system.

Both Alphabet-Google, Huawei and Facebook are behind a potential niche market that showed itself during the pandemic, where more than a billion students had some kind of pedagogical link through the internet and millions could not do so. The strategy of these corporations turns elementary schools, secondary schools and universities into potential markets and the public education budget becomes a great booty to raid, which involves demolishing the foundations of the face-to-face public school. Therefore, controlling connectivity, but also virtual platforms and digital content, involves valuing them as goods of potential educational consumption and the backbone of the new educational machine.

In the second stream, there are those who propose free access to the internet, among them, the SpaceX corporation. Mr. Musk, owner of SpaceX, presented in 2016, before the US Federal Communications Commission, a project for the free distribution of the internet provided through a chain of 4,425 satellites placed around the world. He has been working on this initiative and has shown his interest in joining the educational agenda, pointing out that the school connectivity is a priority in his strategy. Of course, what Musk is valuing is the volume of merchandise, consumption and profits that this would bring.

The internet has become a privileged space for trading, with companies working in this environment and listed on the stock exchanges. In May 2021 Statista published the «Ranking of Internet companies with the highest market capitalization value as of March 2021» in which their place was shown, in order of mention, with values ​​ranging between 1,500 and 146 million of dollars starting with [5] Amazon.com (1,557.49) and continuing with Alphabet (1,368.28), Tencent (819.47), Facebook (733.62), AliBaba (643.62), Meituan (258, 1), Netflix (238.65), Pinduoduo (210.63), Prosus (192.16) and Jd.com (146.9). The bimodal or virtual education model is not stranger to this dynamic, on the contrary, education associated with connectivity emerges as a potential mass market niche and impacted these values ​​in 2019-2021.

In that sense, educational institutions, mostly offline, show the obsolescence of the old educational machine of the first and second industrial revolutions. For the imposition of the virtual-digital education model, in any of its penetration modalities, capitalism needs to make evident to society the gap between schooling and education.

In order to facilitate the advent of the new educational machine for the fourth industrial revolution, capital has been building an educational bubble, whose causes of explosion are intended to be attributed to the teaching staff. This bubble began to be built in the seventies of the twentieth century and was re-dimensioned with the announcement of the fourth industrial revolution; It has a special chapter, both in the educational policies announced in 2015 at the World Education Forum in Incheon Korea, and in the neo-privatization of education that occurred during the years 2020-2021.

     • What is the educational bubble?

The educational bubble summarizes the set of initiatives of transnational capital aimed at building a scenario of global breakdown of face-to-face educational systems as we have known it since the first industrial revolution.

Capitalism needs to break with the common sense of schooling and for this it is building dynamics that point to chaos scenarios, which facilitate the creation of hegemony over the need to do education in a radically different way.

Capital tries to converge these chaos scenarios to generate a bursting of the educational bubble. By virtue of the impact on the educational market, the bursting of the educational bubble has to be preceded by a progressive and sustained transfer from the face-to-face business spheres to the virtual-digital ones, therefore it is not an immediate fact.

Capitalism, in the current period of accumulation crisis, needs to use the money destined to sustain face-to-face school systems, for the  dynamization of the technological sector and to generate a model of cultural reproduction different from the one it sustained during the first two industrial revolutions. For this reason, it has set its sights on 6% of GDP as a minimum investment in education, especially in the areas of teacher payroll, infrastructure and equipment, as resources that can be used for the formation of educational systems organized around the virtual and digital world . The bursting of the bubble must be preceded by paths for this transfer.

    • How did capitalism build the conditions of possibility for an educational bubble?

For the construction of the educational bubble, capitalism has developed at least three convergent operations. The first, the global standardization of educational policies; second, an appropriation of the central agendas of the pedagogical and, third, the construction of hegemony with respect to the virtual-digital. The notion of educational crisis before society and the educational world transverses each of these operations.

What is beginning to consolidate on the horizon of capital is the impulse of a model of home education, which is being presented as avant-garde, which not only adds to the commercialization and privatization the appropriation of 6% of GDP in education, but also removes from the agenda of the National States the economic and budgetary commitments to guarantee the human right to education; from this perspective, governments would not have to guarantee the financing of school systems. Let’s look at each of the operations to build the educational bubble.

    • Standardization of educational policies

With the culmination of the two world wars of the 20th century, a new financial architecture of capitalism and the United Nations system emerged, within which UNESCO is located. As these dynamics are consolidated, a route is established from the center to the capitalist periphery for decision-making in public policies in countries under the influence of capital. We do not thereby deny the nuances and specific forms that these decisions take in each national context, but rather indicate their strategic orientation.

Two of the great starting centers for decision-making in public policies derive from the approved agendas, both from the G7 (at times G8) meetings and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The G7 decisions guide the work of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which establishes the axes and priorities of public policies for each country, in accordance with the various relationships that are established between the capitalist center and the periphery. Routes set by the IMF serve in turn to determine financing priorities for the so-called development banks (World Bank, OECD, IDB, among others), with external indebtedness acting as a conditioning factor in decision-making in matters of development. educational policies. This engineering of public policies has been perfected during neoliberal globalization, however, the logic of capitalism to subject them to the contingent competition of the market, makes it necessary to adjust them permanently.

Today the World Economic Forum (WEF), better known as the Davos Forum, plays a central role in the design of the transition route between the third and fourth industrial revolutions, which is why it is increasingly talking about education, graduation profiles and professionals fields.

 In the framework of the cold war, UNESCO acquired the identity of instance for dialogue and encounter, promoting institutions on both sides of the border between the USSR and the capitalist world. This created the image of a progressive UNESCO, a situation that began to change with the crisis and subsequent fall of the so-called Soviet socialism.

There is a perception in many teachers that UNESCO is a neutral space, which shows their ignorance of the governance and decision-making mechanisms of this multilateral body. UNESCO is governed by representatives of the countries who follow the lines established by their governments. As the vast majority of the countries of the world are capitalist, the orientation of the multilateral organ is capitalist, although within it the nuances of the center and the periphery of the system are expressed.

In order to refine UNESCO’s strategic subordination to the designs of the capitalist center, a scenario of even greater dependence of the multilateral organ with respect to development banks (that is to say, the IMF, the G7 and the FEM) was constructed. At the 36th General Conference of UNESCO (2011), the member states decided to approve by a fair majority the entry of Palestine as a member state of this multilateral body; This decision became a pretext for the US and Israel to decide not to continue contributing to the financing of UNESCO, leaving an important gap in the body’s budget. The Directorate General of UNESCO, far from seeking to cover the quota with extraordinary contributions from the richest member countries or the development of an austerity program at the Paris headquarters, chose to weaken regional programs and get much closer to the OECD, the World Bank , the IDB, among others. This ended up ensuring UNESCO’s dependence on the capitalist center. The aim was to deepen the line of standardization of public policies in education that UNESCO has been promoting since its creation, but especially since the 1970s.

A few years before the assault on the 36th General Conference of UNESCO, just when the blocks of the Soviet experience were beginning to fall, UNESCO convened the Jomtein Conference (1990) in Thailand, in which the dramatic world educational situation was denounced that left more than 100 million children out of school, in a world in which 960 million human beings were illiterate and more than a third of the planet’s inhabitants lacked access to printed knowledge and much more to latest technologies. This framework made possible the beginning of a new generation of global actions for the standardization of public policies that, however, have not been revealed as effective in guaranteeing the right to education, since at the end of 2019 the number of children excluded from school systems not only did not reduce, but exceeded 200 million.

In Jomtein there is a qualitative leap in the acceptance of UNESCO member states regarding the standardization of national educational policies, to ensure the convergence of initiatives promoted from the capitalist center. The Jomtein Declaration contains ten articles [6], a Framework for Action with three main guidelines, objectives and goals, as well as Guidelines for Action to be assumed by the countries. The Jomtein Declaration contains Priority Actions at the National Level, the mechanisms for the development of a favorable political context, as well as the conception of national policies to improve basic education through the mobilization of information and communication channels, the coordination of actions and resource mobilization. The establishment of consultation channels on educational policy issues is contemplated as a way of ensuring contextualized standardization. Jomtein (1990) expresses the impulse of the culture of standardization in national public policies, presented with educational purposes that most of us could share; The important thing, as the Incheón assessment would show, would not be to achieve a reduction in exclusion, but rather to accept the standardization of public policies on a global scale. The line drawn by the Jomtein Declaration was monitored by an international committee coordinated by UNESCO.

Ten years later, a world summit would be held to evaluate the scope and prospects of the lines of action approved in Jomtein. The Dakar meeting (2000) generated the Education for All (EFA) Framework for Action: meeting our common commitments, which continues to fine-tune the standardization of education policies on a global scale. The declaration begins by stating “We, the participants in the World Education Forum, meeting in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000, commit ourselves to fulfill the objectives and goals of education for all, for all citizens and all societies”.

Presented as a conquest of noble objectives, the standardization of national educational policies had been imposed, practically without any resistance. This dynamic was enveloping and at all levels, as is recognized in paragraph 4 of the declaration by stating “We congratulate ourselves for the commitments made by the international community with basic education during the 1990s, in particular at the World Summit in favor of Children (1990), Conference on Environment and Development (1992), World Conference on Human Rights (1993), World Conference on Special Educational Needs: Access and Quality (1994), International Conference on Population and Development (1994), the World Summit for Social Development (1995), the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), the Mid-Decade Meeting of the International Consultative Forum on Education for All (1996), the Fifth International Conference on Adult Education (1997) and the International Conference on Child Labor (1997). It is now a question of putting those commitments into practice ”.

The decade of the nineties was one of the standardization of global educational policies, which, of course, had an uneven and combined development between the center and the periphery, between the imperialist nations and the dependent-neo-colonized nations and, between each of the nations.

In the nineties, standardization has a special chapter in the concretion and sedimentation of the evaluative culture. As we have pointed out, the standardized tests were preceded by the debates generated by Coleman (1966) and Faure (1973) Reports, which raised the difficulties that school systems had to accompany the acceleration of innovation. The defining categories of the Faure Report, on the inability of world education to foresee scientific-technological development and its limited possibilities of providing the professionals required by the mode of production, led to the conclusion that this problem should be solved with the impulse of evaluative culture.

Neoliberal globalization in the eighties of the twentieth century gave force categories to the evaluative culture in education, by pointing out that the crisis of the nation states was expressed in problems of educational quality and relevance. Now the evaluative culture could be oriented to assess such quality and relevance. As educational quality it was – and is – an ephemeral and multiform concept, it became the preferred orientation of capital to introduce, like a Trojan horse, the changes in education that the mode of production demanded, without occasionally ceasing to appeal to relevance [7].

The evaluative culture, which now had two categories to guide its work, required not only national institutions to specify it, but also an international standardization of its work. In 1994, the neoliberal government of Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, served as host in Monterrey, Nuevo León, for the creation of the Latin American Laboratory for the Evaluation of Educational Quality (LLECE), a body that became attached to the Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC) of UNESCO based in Santiago de Chile. The standardization circle was closed even more and its definitions were standardized.

The LLECE inaugurates a new stage in the regional and global educational evaluation with the First Regional Comparative Study in Education (PERCE) elaborated through standardized tests, to be followed by SERCE [8], TERCE [9] and ERCE [10]. Although the LLECE tests are evaluations of some learning by countries and regionally, they are presented by the propagandists of the system as indicators of educational quality.Sectors that promote the privatization of education use the adverse results of these standardized tests to attack public education and promote the private one. The passivity with which critical sectors in education, unions and guilds reacted to this wave of evaluative standardization is surprising; the image of a neutral UNESCO surely contributed to this.

Given the passivity of educational resistance due to this new standardizing phenomenon, the capitalist center decided to promote the experience worldwide; the creation of LLECE was a test for such a world politics. Mr. Andreas Schleicher, at that time a senior UNESCO official, who because of his position in Paris moved  between the corridors of UNESCO headquarters and the OECD offices, would be a relevant figure for the implementation of the PISA tests. Indeed, Schleicher became, since 2006, the worldwide coordinator of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a position that places him in the rank of planetary minister of educational standardization.

The PISA tests, contrary to those promoted by LLECE-UNESCO, have generated protests and resistance from the beginning. This is because the OECD does not have UNESCO’s veil of neutrality and everyone recognizes the economic body as part of the capitalist center. But, the OECD lacks the tradition to build a narrative that allows justifying standardization and even less evaluative culture; the construction of a discourse that promotes change, standardization and evaluation is required to ensure educational quality, international cooperation between educational systems and technology corporations, between ministries of education and the so-called development banks, between public education and the so-called financial philanthropy. This is where UNESCO’s expertise comes into play.

However, the real contribution of development banks to education budgets is more an illusion than something tangible. For example, the OECD, which promotes PISA tests and aims to tell all governments what to do in school systems, only contributes 0.03% of the GDP of its member countries to so-called development policies. It is clear that their work is for the benefit of the logic of capital and not of the excluded majorities, although they intend to dictate educational guidelines in low- and middle-income countries.

In Education enclosed a Treasure (1996), a document coordinated by Mr. Delors, UNESCO takes on the challenge imposed by economic globalization and cultural globalization, trying to build a narrative that updates education according to the requirements of the mode of production. at the dawn of the XXI century. For this reason, this document speaks openly of an education for economic purposes (Ch. 3), reconsidering and uniting the different stages of education [11], extending international cooperation in the global planetary village, towards a globalization of all fields of human activity, the dematerialization of work, work in the informal economy, towards educational synergies, the quality of teaching staff, evaluation and public debate of results, repercussions of new technologies on society and education, among others topics.

The Delors Report establishes a new fabric of categories that promote the change of school systems towards the fourth industrial revolution. Despite the immense popularity of this document, which manages to gather concerns not only from economic bodies but also from progressive sectors, its greatest usefulness fell in legitimizing the dynamics of standardization promoted by the multilateral body.

In the case of university education, UNESCO’s efforts in that historical period were more timid and had focused on the old CRESALC [12] converted into IESALC [13] and, on CEPES located in Budapest, the latter being dismantled after the collapse of the USSR. For their part, the initiatives carried out at the meeting of university rectors, held in Havana in 1996, even though that was not their purpose, were used to promote standardization in the sector. In Cuba, the highest authorities of region universities expressed their concerns about the growing pressure of technology on higher education, opening a debate that led UNESCO to convene the World Conference on Higher Education (CMES, 1998) where, in addition to reinforcing the discourse of educational quality and relevance added the need to assess the impact. While many might come to think that CMES reinforced UNESCO’s line of work in the higher education sector, the result was in the opposite direction, since months after this event, it eliminated the General Directorate of Higher Education; This seems to express the pressure and interest of the World Bank in assuming the global coordination of higher education, just as the OECD aspires to do the same in primary and secondary education.

The specificity of the evaluative culture in higher education and the limitations to replicate the evaluative culture model of the first levels of the educational system opened the way to the promotion of rankings [14] and publication indexes, as classification mechanisms (indirect evaluation ) of the university sector.

The categories quality and relevance of education, generated in the university sector the sub categories impact, updating, relevance and internationalization that contained the requirement to link university education with scientific-technological acceleration, using the evaluative culture as the «opener» of the change required. However, the university rankings implemented at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, they have had little capacity to influence in this sense. On the contrary, these rankings have become hateful classifications that promote the competitive paradigm, but do not solve the gap between what is taught and the innovations necessary to act in the mode of production and, the world impacted by the third and fourth industrial revolution. These rankings have turned into unbridled careers for publishing in indexed journals and working with widely recognized researchers, requiring the citation of recent texts, which are not necessarily current. In a long path to capture external financing as a privatization model, internationalization has become the promotion of a generation of managers with access to budgetary resources and the copying of business management models for the university sector.

Teaching difficulties to keep up with the acceleration of scientific-technological innovation not only have a correlate in the supporters of cognitive capitalism. In the field of anti-capitalist resistance, we see how the theme of the unusual acceleration of innovation is usually absent in many of the analyzes of critical pedagogies. The pride of the academic world, used to being a reference of knowledge, makes it difficult to understand this phenomenon and its direct relationship with the defense of public education, something that is part of the epistemic gap. Beyond the efforts of individuals, what the university institutions do in this regard, resembles the lurching movements of childhood (in a party) when trying to find with a stick (rankings), the location of the elusive piñata (quality). Let’s see the most popular rankings.

The Quacquarelli Symonds ranking, better known as QS, is generated by an English company founded in 1990, which, at the height of the neoliberal culture, worked to generate world rankings that would serve to assess the impact of studying abroad. It is a ranking that models the internationalization in education and that in recent times has carried out studies on different careers in the undergraduate, postgraduate studies, especially Master’s, Doctorate, PhD and business or MBA postgraduates.

The subject of the University Rankings clearly shows, not only the emergence of a new world economic power, but its full adherence to the neoliberal educational paradigm. China emerges as one of the referents of these classifications that seek to guide the activity of the academic world. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), better known as the Shanghai Ranking, was compiled in 2003 by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The criteria of this ranking are based on educational quality, which, as we have seen, constitutes one of the force categories of the neoliberal educational discourse and of the evaluative culture that it promotes. ARWU works on quality of research processes and results, adding its relationship with the relevance and per capita impact of institutional activity, having a great weight in this classification that universities have researchers who have obtained international prizes, especially Nobel and Medalists Fields [15].

The ranking THE, the acronym for Times Higher Education created in 2001, acquires new emphasis since 2010 when it separated that year from the QS World University Rankings. THE is a bibliometric ranking that works with the information provided by Thomson Reuters, an information company that is listed on the stock exchange and is part of the cultural industrial complex of the 21st century.

The Center for World-Class Universities developed the World University Rankings (CWUR), since 2012 it has developed the notions of educational quality linked to the training of students and the prestige of its academics, which is given by the impact of their research, fundamentally by their incidence in refereed and indexed publications.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, neoliberal policies have made Scopus especially popular, which is a bibliographic database, focused on abstracts of articles published in peer-reviewed and indexed journals that are considered to be of great impact. Scopus is developed by Elsevier, which is part of the transnational Relex Group, the largest publisher of medical texts and scientific literature, with a very marked quantitative and positivist paradigm.

Other Rankings, such as the Eduniversal, the G Factor focused on the use of the google search engine, the discontinued HEEACT elaborated by the Council of Evaluation and Accreditation of Higher Education of Taiwan that was renamed from the 2012 Ranking of the National University of Taiwan, the HRLR (2007) which in Spanish means Resumen Laboral y de Recursos Humanos which works on educational quality in aspects associated with graduates, executives and the competitiveness of human capital formed by universities, the RPI (2010) or Australian index performance of research in high-impact universities, the Nature Index or Nature Index focused on the research of the so-called natural sciences and life sciences, the Mines Paris Tech, the RUR generated in Moscow, among others, passed to be a benchmark for the most recent publication and research activities, but they did not resolve the connection between academic activity and the acceleration of innovation.

An important element to be taken into account is that most of these classifications focus on showing widely referenced works among renowned authors and institutions, turning into a kind of game of «turning around and biting one’s tail.» These rankings were inefficient to break all dimensions of the epistemic gap, since many of the “ranked” activities did not necessarily account for the obsolescence of the educational machine, nor for the acceleration trends of technological innovation. in terms of its impact on the world of work, education and governance, much less on the needs of the people and the working class. The rankings ended up reaffirming what the Faure Report (1972) denounced, the inability to foresee educational and social situations such as the one that occurred in COVID-19 and limitations to provide emerging virtual education practices, as well as to enter the depths of the digital world .

The Leiden Ranking [16] (2008), SCImago Institutions Rankings SIR (2009), SCImago Journal & Country Rank SJR (2009), Web Ranking of Universities, Webometrics (2004), Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities NTU (2007 ), International Colleges & Universities UNIRAK (2005), did not escape the trend described above.

Rankings stimulated university competition and facilitated the landing of educational commodification, but did not resolve the epistemic gap between academic activity and what was required to match the pace of innovation’s acceleration. While rankings and publication indexes did their work in the construction of hegemony over the globalization of skills in the university sector, UNESCO continued with its complementary work of standardization.

At the same time that UNESCO has convened two CMES (2009-2022) additional to the one of 1998, the reality is that along the way it was weakening until it almost asphyxiated and institutionally disoriented IESALC [16], the only type 1 institute that could monitor the agreements of the CMES. At the time of writing this paper (December 2021) there is strong criticism from academic, union, guilds and student organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean about the dark alliance between IESALC and the IDB [17] and the World Bank (WB) for the impulse of the CMES2022, which shows the strategic and standardizing orientation that they are  seeking to give to it. Apparently there is an orientation from the General Directorate of UNESCO regarding the World Conference on University Education 2022 being accompanied (or directed) in Latin America and the Caribbean by bodies that have regional mandates recognized by this multilateral body, such as the Organization of Ibero-Americans States. (OEI) and the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), who raised the convenience of incorporating the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In other words, as if we were in the era of conquest and colonization, the autonomous organizations of professors in the university sector end up being subalternized, as a public that must applaud the speeches of colonialist Europe. They offer «little mirrors» such that Latin American teachers and academic organizations can post their comments on the IESALC and CMES2022 websites, or send documents that will be published, even if their contributions will not be part of the pre-defined «Final Declaration» with the 10 points [18] with which UNESCO intends to give standardized instructions to the ministries of education and the university sector, debates have not been uniform in the two conferences held and the one that is in progress. The first focused on possessing higher education in the face of the subjugation of technology with the historical keys of autonomy and social commitment, thus assuming quality and relevance as central. Francisco López Segrera (2009), points out that in the case of the second CMES the central debate was between education as a “common good” or as a “public service”; although nominally in the end the former prevailed, it could be said that what was approved was a hybrid of both concepts. The second CMES delved into the categories evaluation, quality, accreditation, quality assurance and the relationship between quality and relevance.

On the website of the UNESCO Instituto de Educación Superior para América Latina y el Caribe (IESALC), in the tab of current priorities of the institute in terms of university education are placed: internationalization, quality and relevance, equity, inclusion and innovation. The strategic orientation is clear.

It seems important to me to specify much more about the idea of ​​education «as a common good», presented as opposed to the idea of ​​»education as a public service», above all, because this was the statement of the strategic document published by UNESCO in 2015 [19]. As a way to justify the adoption of “education as a common good” it is stated that “it is necessary to rethink the principles that govern the governance of education, and, in particular, the normative principle of education as a public good and how it should be understood in the changing context of society, the state and the market [20] ”(2015, p.78), that is, rethinking education to adapt it to the requirements of the economy, the requirements of the mode of production.

The debates have not been uniform in the two conferences held and the one that is in progress. The first focused on possessing higher education in the face of the subjugation of technology with the historical keys of autonomy and social commitment, thus assuming quality and relevance as central. Francisco López Segrera (2009), points out that in the case of the second CMES the central debate was between education as a “common good” or as a “public service”; Although nominally in the end the former prevailed, it could be said that what was approved was a hybrid of both concepts. The second CMES delved into the categories evaluation, quality, accreditation, quality assurance and the relationship between quality and relevance.

On the website of the UNESCO Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), in the tab of current priorities of the institute in terms of university education are placed: internationalization, quality and relevance, equity, inclusion and innovation. The strategic orientation is clear.

It seems important to me to specify much more about the idea of ​​education «as a common good», which is presented as opposed to the idea of ​​»education as a public service», above all, because this was the statement of the strategic document published by UNESCO in 2015 [19]. To justify the adoption of “education as a common good” it is stated that “it is necessary to rethink the principles that govern the governance of education, and, in particular, the normative principle of education as a public good and how it should be understood in the changing context of society, the state and the market [20] ”(2015, p.78), that is, rethinking education to adapt it to the economy  requirements , those ones of the mode of production. The UNESCO document assumes the concept of Deneulin, S., and Townsend, N. (2007), defining the common good as “made up of goods that human beings intrinsically share in common and that communicate with each other, such as values , civic virtues and the sense of justice ”(2015, p. 85), that is, the dominant ideology, marginalizing the financing of the debate, the latter being the one of greatest concern to the peoples. Furthermore, without the guarantee of the nation states’ funding to the school systems, the right to education is threatened.

Consequently, the notion of “common good” corresponds more to the neoliberal paradigm of an educating society, which was shown in all its bloody force during the Covid-19 pandemic when the national states abandoned their obligation to guarantee the financing of the minimum conditions for the development of the right to education [21]. As the educational authorities pointed out, if education is everyone’s responsibility, citizens progressively must assume the costs of its financing.

This Unesco document (2015) reaffirms the line of standardization, stating that “the normative and regulatory systems for the distribution of world goods such as education are not new, but they are becoming more complex (…) the result is a progressive displacement of the seat of authority from the state to the world level, where not only intergovernmental organizations, but also, and increasingly, civil society organizations, companies, foundations and think tanks of civil society are in charge of its promotion ”(2015. P.72). Standardization is shown in all its complementarity with commodification.

UNESCO’s perspective is increasingly located in the line of capitalist standardization, raising in this last document its concern about the gap between education and employment, the role of educators in the knowledge society, education as a public good under pressure that is reconfiguring the agenda of national debates.

Returning to the first levels of the educational system, we have to say that Education for All (EFA) became the center of international action to standardize educational policies at the primary and secondary level between 2000 and 2014. In May 2014, the UNESCO convenes in the Sultanate of Oman the world balance meeting of Education For All (EFA), from which the Muscat Agreement emerges. There, a non-encouraging balance of EFA is made, showing that 24 years after Jomtein (1990) more than 57 million boys and girls and 69 million adolescents did not have access to basic education. Of course, the educational discourse had been unified in an important way and the educational policies of the nation states had been aligned, but as in any capitalist society the tensions between capital and labor had been resolved in favor of the first to the detriment of the second, for this reason , the number of people excluded from education was still so high.

Although the Muscat Agreement (2014) recognizes that it observes “with concern the persistence of inequalities in terms of access, participation and learning outcomes at all educational levels, especially for the most vulnerable groups and minorities”, it insists on the theme of world standardization by specifying that “education must… form an integral part of the broader framework of international development”. And it goes even further, considering that, as of 2015, education must be linked to the development goals of the system «and be framed within a global objective, with measurable global goals and related indicators [22] «.

In the Muscat agreement, one of the categories of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s is taken to designate what would be a sustainable development objective (SDG): quality of education. The statement concludes by noting that “we strongly support UNESCO’s leadership and coordination, helping to shape the post-2015 education agenda in collaboration with EFA partners”.

These partners today include global corporations such as Ericsson, IBM Corporation, Vodafone, Google, Microsoft, Micro: bit, Ted-Ed, the World Business Coalition for Education, Moodle, Huawei, Verizom, Siemens, Telefónica SA, Uber , Group of International Education Funders, Tecnovación, KPMG, Zoom, Tencent, EDX, Johns Hopkins Institute for Educational Policy, Educa virtual, SpaceCom, McGrawHill, Coursera, Cristian Dior Courture, Lifelong Learning Platform, CreateView, OECD, Amgen Foundation, GIZ, Michel Lafon Education, Wikimedia, Do, LabXchange, Learning Bits, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Worlddidac, World Economic Forum, Festo Didactic, among many others. It is obvious that globalization and standardization go hand in hand with big capital.

In May 2015, UNESCO convened the World Education Forum (WEF), which was held in Incheon, South Korea, to ratify the balance of the EFA (Muscat Agreement) and to think about common policies for 2030. In the Numeral 9 of the Incheon declaration integrates standardization and evaluation culture, stating that “We are committed to quality education and to the improvement of learning outcomes, for which it is necessary to strengthen the inputs, processes and evaluation of the results and the mechanisms to measure progress ”.

In number 12 of the Incheon text, the standardization line that national states must assume under the aegis of globalization is ratified, by stating «we reaffirm that the fundamental responsibility of successfully applying this agenda corresponds to the governments.» As a pressure and control mechanism, this same paragraph contemplates that «legal and political frameworks will be established that promote accountability and transparency, as well as participatory management and coordinated associations at all levels and in all sectors.»

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) approved the SDGs and accepted the name that came out of Muscat. Thus, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number four is dedicated to education under the name of SDG4: quality of education. When we proceed to assess goals and indicators of this development objective, we see that most of the goals and indicators refer to the lag left by the first two industrial revolutions. However, when we analyze the supra-target indicators of SDG4, expressed in 4.a.1. we see the effort to contribute to the transition between the third and fourth industrial revolutions; This refers to: proportion of schools with access to: a) electricity; b) Internet for educational purposes; c) computers for educational purposes; d) infrastructure and materials adapted for students with disabilities; e) basic supply of drinking water; f) basic sanitation facilities segregated by sex; and g) basic hand-washing facilities (as defined by the WASH indicators). However, the teaching updating strategy to obtain professional training capable of acting in virtual-digital environments in the transition between the third and fourth industrial revolution is almost imperceptible; In this sense, SDG4 contributes to the construction of the educational bubble, to the global crisis of school systems, by not establishing paths for the transition from the face-to-face public school of the first two industrial revolutions to the face-to-face educational institutions of the fourth. industrial revolution. Evidently, we agree with goals of eradicating exclusion, increasing coverage and improving teaching-learning processes, but these should have been in a greater framework of mobility and break with standardization and normalization that dismisses authentic contextualization.

   • Appropriation of central pedagogical agendas

Face –to -face public education has become a hope for the peoples of the world, especially for those of us who make a living from work. Its defense is non-negotiable in any process of transformation of school systems. In addition, this face-to-face public education must be inclusive, egalitarian, popular, democratic, scientific and of ancestral recognition, community and global, ecological, feminist knowledge that promotes peace and sustainable development.

For this reason, the offensive against face-to-face public school has generated on the part of the capital a set of actions that cannot be disjointed, but integrated in the same direction. We will briefly work on some of them: de-pedagogization, curricularisation of the pedagogical act, divestment in technological updating, precarious teacher salaries, the new model of educational privatization, the obsolescence of the teacher training model.

    •De-pedagogization: pedagogy is the confluence of educational dynamics that guide the teaching-learning process. To the extent that pedagogy is worked in a participatory, collaborative and collective way by teaching teams, so, its transforming potential of consciences and realities is enormous.

The pedagogical groups tend to subvert the order of operation of the school machine, to break into its belts, into its gears. The force of the collective is enhanced by harmonizing the different pedagogical components in a radical melody that encourages emancipatory, libertarian education. Therefore, capital strives to break the dialectic of the dynamic interaction of pedagogical elements.

This is how they were decomposing and dismantling pedagogies. Converting each of its dynamics into separate and autonomous “pieces”, breaking with the contextual balance of its work through pedagogical groups.

At different historical moments, between the fifties and the beginning of the XXI century, the fashions of didacticism, school management and planning, evaluation and the curriculum were imposed, as if each of these fashions were the heart of pedagogy; it was about de-pedagogizing the educational fact.

In the last decades, capital has been reducing the pedagogical act to tasks of the curricular administration. In this perspective, the other components of the pedagogies were like complementary pieces, ceasing to be interactive dynamics.

The de-pedagogization sought to convert education into processes and products, standardized and measurable, with entry and exit profiles, as if the students were merchandise in the making.

In the educational group, the de-pedagogization tried to turn them into operators of a reproductive and alienated work where thinking and reflecting was not allowed. For this reason, the hourly charges do not contemplate daily spaces for reflection on what has been done, but technical-teaching meetings were structured to assess the state of the “production chain”. The prohibition of pedagogical groups or the non-remuneration of the reflective activity on the educational fact, operated as de-pedagogy fueled by salary problems that forced teachers to carry out other tasks to complement the salary.

De-pedagogization acts as a destruction of the teaching identity in the construction route of the educational bubble.

   • Curricularization of educational processes: when the dialectic of interaction of pedagogy dynamics broke down, the paradigm of curricularization of the educational fact began to be imposed.

For the input-process-product logic, what is important is what he/she teaches, that is, the contents, whether they are presented as subjects or fields of learning.

Contents allowed the educational merchandise to be modeled, that is, to sequence the information and practices necessary to achieve graduation profiles (product-merchandise). In the end, contents determined the didactic model, the evaluation typologies, the management style and the planning relationships. They were changeable and adjustable pieces to fulfill the central task of the educational machine, to produce graduates-merchandise, with the ability to reproduce the system through consumption, sociability, citizenship and the use of science-technology for the incessant improvement of the mode of production.

In order to achieve this, they developed the curricular correlate of standardization and evaluative culture. In the midst of the emergence of the educational model crisis  due to the development of the third industrial revolution and its impact on the educational machine, arises the need for a taxonomy that would sequence the contents to give meaning and order for the constant repetition of the educational machine. Coleman (1966) had emphasized on the subject of content and its sequencing in order to be useful to build a certain type of citizen, professional and worker.

For this reason, the work of Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999) was the missing piece which tried to make the old educational machine of the first two industrial revolutions produce the results that the third industrial revolution demanded. Bloom, a psychologist by profession and with a doctorate in education, developed a taxonomy that corresponded to the solution bets derived from the Coleman and Faure reports. It seems that if the educational machine was adjusted, it could produce the new goods that the system required.

Bloom’s taxonomy became a success from the seventies of the twentieth century and was popularized in an important part of the educational systems of Latin America, without denying the minority existence of other schemes. Bloom’s approaches arise when the system needed to instrumentalize at the classroom level the standardization and evaluative culture that would make school adaptations possible for the third industrial revolution; something that did not finish emerging.

Bloom argues that mental operations can be structured in six and sequenced in an orderly manner. Bloom’s technique is consistent with Comenius’s epistemology of invariably going from the simple to the complex.

Curricular taxonomies replaced pedagogy or at least were superimposed on it. In the case of Bloom’s taxonomy, the process of sequencing the teaching objectives and structuring the contents takes into account the cognitive (knowledge and / or remembering, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation), affective and psychomotor. Usually the cognitive dimension is used for curriculum construction, given the operational weaknesses of the affective and psychomotor in Bloom. Other taxonomies such as those of David Krathwohl (1921-2016 / attention, response, assessment, organization and characterization) and Ana Jewet (generic movements, organizational movements, creative movements / perception, patterns, adaptation, tuning, variation, improvisation and composition) complemented Bloom’s work on the affective and psychomotor dimensions of the curriculum.

This way of ordering, sequencing, controlling and predicting a result of taxonomies becomes the holy grail of education.

Taxonomies favor that didactics, evaluation, planning, management be complements that act according to the needs of the sequential operation that is being executed. Pedagogy is curricularized and with this, what is taught is centralized in the hands of those who have the authority to decide on the curriculum and content, a requirement of standardization and evaluative culture.

The existing taxonomies, for the most part, favor cultural reproduction, the functioning of the educational machine as a biopolitical weapon. However, the taxonomic or category construction field is necessary when working on the programming of virtual platforms and the generation of digital content, for which this issue cannot be dismissed with pamphlet and simplistic appeals; we have to organize ideas to think about how to build virtuality and the digital world that corresponds to emancipatory and libertarian projects.

Educational processes are curricularized and thus an increasingly similar and uniform behavior is made possible worldwide, so that the emergence of the educational crisis in one place, as in earthquakes, will have its aftershocks in other places. This puts pressure on the construction and explosion of the educational bubble.

     • Divestment in technological updating: At the Jomtein Conference   (1990), it was already warned about problems of technological infrastructure existing in school systems. The technology gap has been maintained and widened in recent years, if not, how many schools, high schools and universities in the world are working with artificial intelligence, big data, metadata analysis, blockchain, augmented virtual reality?

This educational disinvestment in terms of equipment and technological infrastructure is aimed at showing educational institutions as obsolete, as incapable of training in the new, as museums with high operational costs.

In the bimodal model of teaching in the second phase of the pandemic and in the post-pandemic, everything indicates that under the pretext of technological updating, the section of public budgets for education will begin to be attacked. Consequently, they are beginning to point to the enormous weight of teacher payrolls in the budget structure of education.

Disinvestment in technology contributes to expanding the educational bubble and may be the pin with which to prick it for its burst.

   • Precarious teacher salaries: the capitalist system has turned education workers into survivors, given the increasingly declining wages and salaries with respect to inflation levels and the cost of living. On the other hand, different Latin American and Caribbean countries have attempted to assault the educators’ social security systems, which leads to a real-time devaluation of their income.

This precariousness has to do with an increase in labor exploitation in recent decades, to capture the surplus by capital, but also with the need to have one of the largest and most organized sectors of the world working class employed: teachers and professors.

   • New model of educational privatization: during the covid-19 pandemic (2020-2021), cognitive capitalism took giant steps in the construction of the educational bubble. Nation states openly and unscrupulously abandoned their responsibility to guarantee the right to education by providing the minimum conditions to sustain the pedagogical link. Families had to bear costs of the school technology gap (remote connection equipment, internet connection, access to virtual platforms) and the chaos of the epistemic gap.

This meant the launch of a new model of educational privatization, which threatens to continue in the post-pandemic and creates conditions of possibility so that the bursting of the educational bubble generates the least social chaos and guarantees the greatest and fastest transfer of resources from communities across the globe to large tech corporations and virtual homeschool traders.

   • Obsolescence of the teacher training model: the teacher training that we know today is heir to the pioneering French and European experiences of preparing for work in the classroom, implemented at the beginning of the first industrial revolution; moving from the vocation and the will, to the management of science and social utility, the training of teachers assumed as its own the model of the school educational machine launched by capitalism in the first two industrial revolutions.

Schools of future teachers were self-conceived as the shelter of the teaching pigeons. Consequently, teachers of teachers were the most enlightened and they tried to give a comprehensive training to the new ones who afterwards  would have to go to classrooms.

This vision was broken by normal schools, which in Latin America have a strong oppositional tradition and concern for the social agenda. However, their programs at  the best became radical criticisms of the components of the educational machine. In the end, everyone is trained to work in school systems, that is, in the educational machine of the first two industrial revolutions.

Today, teacher training is largely a prisoner of school common sense, which can consider radical reforms, but these efforts end up fitting into the logic of the inherited educational machine. We are very far from daring to think, much less build another way of schooling that breaks from the foundations with biopolitical reproduction.

In fact, during the pandemic it became clear that many of teacher training centers did not have the Faurian capacity [23] to anticipate and provide, because they did not have their own robust virtual platforms to serve the entire population and they lacked architecture of the digital educational cloud in the third or fourth industrial revolution format.

The nature of repetition and reproduction of teacher training centers is functional for the purpose of building the educational bubble.

• Construction of hegemony with respect to the virtual-digital

In Incheón Korea, representatives of large technology corporations showed their progress in virtual and digital proposals, announcing that in a maximum horizon of ten years these dynamics would assume the centrality of education. Therefore,  risks that a Global Pedagogical Blackout (GPA) would occur due to the epistemic gap and the technology gap were enormous. The worst prognoses were shown in 2020 when the educational quarantine was decreed due to the COVID-19 pandemic [24].

During the following years UNESCO made a leap in the organization of events, consultations, conferences and publications on the impact of the virtual and digital in education. Just a few days after the Incheon WEF, the multilateral organization organized the Post-2015 International Conference on ICT and Education in China, which sought to link technology to education quality. In numeral 4 of the Declaration of Qingdao (China) it is indicated that “ICT [25], including mobile learning, should be used to strengthen education systems, knowledge, dissemination and access to information, quality and effective learning , as well as the provision of more efficient services ”; These possibilities were learned in a forced way during the pandemic when many educators only had a cell phone to maintain the pedagogical link with their students. UNESCO assumes in this conference, the generic definition of innovation (ICT) as its own and does not promote a categorization of virtuality and the digital world that be consistent with the characteristics of the teaching-learning processes. It seems then, that education is reduced to a matter of transmission of information and communication.

In the years following Incheon, UNESCO focused on working on strategic alliances between technology corporations and school systems, ethical concerns about the use of artificial intelligence, and educational planning in the age of artificial intelligence. In the first case, it strengthened the meeting strategy between businessmen and large capital philanthropy, with actors from organized civil society and governments.

Regarding the second topic, UNESCO convened the first world conference to promote humanistic artificial intelligence for March 4, 2019. The call contained as questions “To what extent should we allow machines to decide for us? Who writes values ​​and priorities in the algorithms of the machines? If a miscalculation of artificial intelligence causes an accident, who is responsible? What are the limits, if any, of artificial intelligence? [26] ”The tenor of the questions indicates the differences and the debate that currently occurs in the capitalist center (World Economic Forum / OECD-IMF) on the ultimate implications of the current development, which in the words of Ray Kurzweil (Google-FEM), the guru of transhumanism, aim to create a new species, the Singularity, which would mean the zenith of the task assigned by nature to the human species: to guarantee the expansion of intelligence throughout the universe.

In fact, the convocation note to the meeting on ethics states that “artificial intelligence is the new frontier of humanity. The principle that governs it is not to become autonomous or substitute for human intelligence, we must ensure that it develops through a humanist prism ”(2019). The Paris meeting built the way for the presentation in September 2020 of the Draft Recommendation on  ethics of artificial intelligence, which recognizes “the deep and dynamic impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on societies, ecosystems and human lives, particularly the human mind, due in part to the new ways in which it influences human thinking, interactions and decision-making and affects education, human and social sciences, exact and natural sciences, culture and communication and information ”(2020). These recommendations state that:

“AI systems are information processing technologies that incorporate models and algorithms that produce an ability to learn and perform cognitive tasks, leading to results such as prediction and decision-making in real and virtual environments. AI systems are designed to function with a certain autonomy, through the modeling and representation of knowledge and the exploitation of data and the calculation of correlations. They can include multiple methods, such as, but not limited to:

1. machine learning, including deep learning and reinforcement learning;

2. automatic reasoning, including planning, scheduling, representation of knowledge and reasoning, search and optimization;

3. cyber-physical systems, including the Internet of things, robotic systems, social robotics and interfaces between human beings and computers, which involve the control, perception, processing of data collected by sensors and the operation of the actuators in the environment in which AI systems operate;

It is clear that these recommendations are talking about the need for a new educational machine to emerge from the fourth industrial revolution, which can be controlled and run by the old model of world governance. We are not so sure that this can be easily achieved, but what is remarkable is the beginning among UNESCO member states of a debate that has not yet permeated teacher training centers, schools and universities. In addition, a narrative is built that begins to explain to the common the causes of an eventual burst of the global educational bubble.

The recent 41st General Conference of UNESCO, held in Paris in November 2021, approved the Recommendations on the ethics of artificial intelligence, which now becomes a reference normative instrument when developing educational policies at the national level of each of the  member states.

In a complementary dynamic, UNESCO had convened in Beijing, from May 16 to 19, 2019, the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence. There China showed the world how the use of easy biometric recognition, artificial intelligence and metadata analysis can be used to generate higher levels of control and efficiency of budget and university activity. Smart cameras in each classroom, which generate real-time reports on the behavior, attention and learning possibilities of each student, support  the decision-making about their permanence in the educational system and / or refer to another field of learning.

In the Asian country (2019) the Beijing Consensus on artificial intelligence and education is approved, in which it is agreed: a) Planning of artificial intelligence in educational policies; b) artificial intelligence for the management and delivery of education; c) that artificial intelligence be used to support teaching and teachers; d) the use of artificial intelligence for learning and learning assessment; e) the development of values ​​and competencies for life and work in the era of artificial intelligence; f) that artificial intelligence is valued as a route to offer lifelong learning opportunities for all; promoting the equitable and inclusive use of artificial intelligence in education; g) promote artificial intelligence with gender equality and artificial intelligence for gender equality; h) ensure the ethical, transparent and verifiable use of educational data and algorithms; as well as issues of monitoring, evaluation, research, financing and international alliances to reach this consensus.

The distance between this Beijing Consensus and what is actually happening in the world’s schools, especially in the global south, becomes an element that capital uses to build the educational bubble.

This occurs only months before the pandemic breaks out, the quarantine is generated at home and the temporary closure of schools, as well as the massive landing of virtuality, an essential requirement for the development of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, in the last decades a set of phenomena of social insertion for the construction of hegemony of the virtual-digital world have been occurring. Some of these initiatives are:

   • Video games: the recreational way for the construction of hegemony over the virtual-digital

The generation that as children and adolescents used Computer Space (1971) and Atari 2600 (1977) as a form of entertainment, something that no other generation had done in a massive way, today is leading ministries of education, multilateral organizations, research centers. It is a generation that had the opportunity to know or act on the digital-virtual, as something that could be used in daily life  in the living room at home or the privacy of the sleeping room. Despite its overcrowding, only a minority could actually access its use, but its existence became known to everyone.

If we understand the long historical trajectory of the arrival of the virtual-digital we can understand the difficulties that capital has had for its use in the mode of production, consumption and the construction of dominated mentalities; However, potentialities of this field have not only made it persist, but also continue to deepen its possibilities for the link between education and market.

For adults and older adults who played with these consoles, the epistemic gap is smaller compared to those who could not. Virtuality and  the digital world were introduced at the mass level via gamification.

The generation of children and adolescents who in the eighties were able to use 6-bit memory consoles such as Commodore 64, and entertain themselves with video games such as Pacman or Zaxxon, among others, they were able to see new versatility of digital-virtual today because now they are teachers in classrooms. The arrival of the Asian console Nintendo (1983) and its Mario Bross games (1985) showed that the world had entered the playful race as a route to popularize the virtual. Then portable video games, would come which many people will surely remember Nintendo’s Game Boy (1989).

Next generations of children and adolescents in the nineties would begin to play in 3D with PlayStation, which used CD technology and could have 32-bit memory or like Atari 64 equal number of bits. Resident Evil, Starcraft, or other video games were a blast to play in the nineties. These children and young people are today new professionals and are making their debut in parenthood, being much more cognitively open to understanding the implications of the virtual-digital in all fields, including education.

The explosion of video games in the 21st century with platforms such as PlayStation 4 (now 5), Xbox or Nintendo, whose games were modeled with 3d animation and artificial intelligence, with multiple scenarios, paved the way for the announcement of the Metaverse in 2021. We get used to receiving new news about technological innovations almost every day,

In education, since the late twentieth century, people have been talking about the possibilities of video games in pedagogical activity. The structure from the simple to the complex, the sequentiality of the challenges, contributed to awakening the interest of those in love with the educational machine. However, it is not until the first decade of the 21st century that the work with educational video games ceases to be marginal and multiple bets begin to emerge in this regard. However, teachers’ perception of video games as home entertainment and difficulties of understanding the process by many educational laypersons have made it difficult for them to become overcrowded in school environments. Something that apparently the system wants to solve in the medium term.

The limited use of digital-virtual gamification in schools becomes an element that feeds the notion of educational crisis and builds the false social awareness that this is not an issue of interest to schools and universities, which is functional to the outbreak of the educational bubble and the attack on face-to-face education.

   • The internet and Web site: the information society

In 1989 the internet and hypertext turned into a web converged, but it would take a few years for this to become popular. In the 1990s internet and first generation websites began to be used for educational purposes, especially in some universities.

In the following decades, especially with the development of search engines such as Google, which use artificial intelligence, big data and metadata analysis, the use of the internet became almost essential in the lives of around 4,660 million inhabitants of the planet, and practically There is not a company today that does not have a website to interact with its buyers. most of the world’s universities have a website and blogs are often preferred by primary and secondary education institutions; however, in the latter case, expansion has been slower than in the former.

The problem now is not having the internet, but the speed and stability of the internet that is used in universities and educational centers, something that, as we have already seen, corporations that have the monopoly of providing the service are working on.

Teachers and university students have consensus  about considering  the internet as essential in educational dynamics, even more so after what happened during the pandemic. In the case of the primary and secondary levels, this consensus does not exist and in many cases, due to the overwork experienced during the pandemic, a conservative spirit has been generated regarding its use. This last trend fuels the educational bubble and the potential crisis in face-to-face school systems.

   • Social networks: the digital-virtual in everyday life

Social networks were the most visible face of popularization of the virtual and digital. This popularization focused on cultural reproduction and the promotion of formats and content that would make the landing of transitional cultural elements between the third and fourth industrial revolutions friendly to the common people.

This contributed to creating a common sense of virtual and digital as entertainment and not as a space for creation and education. Despite the fact that more and more human beings used the digital and virtual to build proposals and immaterial merchandise, the bulk of the population saw it only as productions for leisure. The truth is that the phenomenon was massifying and every day there were more users of these dynamics.

  In this process we have seen the emergence and disappearance of some social networks, while others are sustained over time. Social networks became companies that are listed on the stock market and move a part of the world economy. Since its inception with sixdegrees (1997), through Hotmail Messenger (1999), Fotolog and Friendester (2002), myspace / LinkedIn (2003), Facebook, Vimeo and Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005), Spotify and Twitter (2006 ) WhatsApp (2009), Pinterest and Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), Telegram (2013) until reaching Onlyfans and TikTok in 2016, social networks have brought more than half of the population closer to the digital-virtual world. As we have said, this has also made it possible to accustom users to produce-reproduce a logic of the system, although there are those who make ideological resistance in these spaces. Social networks have become a privileged space for biopolitical reproduction and their precarious use in school spaces helps to shape the educational bubble.

    • The formative model of tik tok: brevity, emotional empathy, curiosity and continuity

The social network Tik Tok expresses advances in the use of digital in educational matters, presented as entertainment but with a constitutive logic that is specific to the developments achieved for the use of virtual-digital in the teaching-learning processes. The first element, the brevity that contrasts with the culture of extension in the contents and narratives, typical of the educational machine of the first and second industrial revolutions. The success of this network consists of the possibility of accessing or placing an “interesting” content in a temporary space of 1 to 3 minutes maximum. Discursive brevity is much more difficult to develop for those who are totally alienated by the logic of the educational machine of the first industrial revolutions.

In the last decades neuroscience has developed a series of discoveries about the functioning of the brain, cognition and emotions. These advances are essential to understand why some Tik Tok accounts are more followed than others. Because the algorithm is designed to recognize actions, narratives and imaginations that generate emotional empathy (joy, sadness, curiosity, etc). In this task, the initial and final 10 seconds of each content on Tik Tok are essential for the «success» of an account on this social network.

The third element that is learned by trial and error in Tik Tok, is the importance of arousing curiosity. As a consequence, the most followed accounts are those that by showing something interesting end up generating the need to find a second part.

Finally, continuity as the ability to string together narratives and content, makes cognitive identity to be built, something fundamental in pedagogical activity. The continuity shows the differences in age, social origin, religion, when selecting or producing content and following accounts.

Tik Tok is designed to work on reproduction, not emancipated thought, therefore, it acts as a standardizing dynamic.

Social networks have segmented the world population into two groups, those who use it and who do not, contributing to differentiated perceptions of reality in one case or another. For the system, who is on a network is more reliable than who does not use it. We have seen how the US requires having a Facebook account for the processing of many processes that require determining the personality of the citizen. An institution of  school-secondary-university apart from these dynamics, whether of biopolitical reproduction or creation, become of precarious utility for the model of citizenship, consumption, science and work that drives the cognitive capitalism of the fourth industrial revolution. Showing the educational machine of the first two industrial revolutions as alien to these dynamics contributes to the formation of the educational bubble.

• Augmented virtual reality: from omnipresence to identity de-centering

Millions of children, youth and adults spend hours of their lives in front of a screen and a video game console. Others do it in front of social networks, music or cinema produced by the cultural industrial complex. This maelstrom of connectivity works as a contradictory phenomenon of creation of individual behaviors and loss of own identity. The multiple-use ads of augmented virtual reality, in which through avatars (our digital replicas) we can establish a bridge between physical and virtual reality, constitutes a process that will promote decentration as a superior form of alienation.

The reactive and non-constructive attitude of educational institutions towards augmented virtual reality operates as food for the formation of the global educational bubble.

   • Corporations invest in the development of digital talent

Every day we see how large corporations begin to invest significant volumes of their profits in the construction of mentalities and practices that allow the virtual-digital reproduction of capitalist culture in the fourth industrial revolution. An illustrative example is Huawei who announced in 2020 that it would invest 150 million dollars in the development of digital talent. Other corporations like Google, SpaceX, Facebook, do the same. This workforce training for the virtual-digital world, outside the margins of classical educational institutions contributes to the construction of the educational bubble.

• Difficulties of school to act in the contingency of the virtual-digital: the   COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and its quarantine allowed the massification and social awareness of the multiplicity of uses of the virtual and digital. Of course, this massification is associated with the system’s reproduction. Locking the population at home allowed a rapid education in electronic consumption, delivery dynamics, use of virtual platforms for meetings and remote education, the development of new forms of sociability from the digital and small-scale production.

Callum Williams of the Economist San Francisco published an article on November 8, 2021 in which he pointed out that in the spring of 2020, “about 60% of all working hours in the United States were carried out from living rooms, kitchens and, for the lucky few, home offices. The results of this experiment are ready, and they suggest that many of these new work practices will go on. » In other words, there was an unprecedented turnaround that has a direct impact on the way in which school systems will train professionals of the future. Before the pandemic, only 5% of middle and low-paid workers in the US considered working at home to be positive, in contrast to the 50% who now see it as favorable after experiencing the pandemic.

As one would expect, this is in the capitalist center, because in the periphery with little connectivity, electricity problems or lack of equipment, added to the drastic reductions in jobs, the reality is quite different. But this difference in perception and acceptance does not seem to stop the change that is beginning to be imposed.

During the pandemic, at least 40% of students and teachers had serious difficulties when trying to keep the pedagogical link, generating other forms of exclusion not known until now. The scenario shown during the pandemic, which is total responsibility of the neoliberal governments and the imperialist nations, is beginning to be attributed to resistance from the teaching staff, as a way of feeding the educational bubble.

This construction of daily hegemony was backed by an offensive by multilateralism, large corporations and development banks on the imminence of something new. The «reset» or «reboot» narrative installed by the World Economic Forum is the best example of this. In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic and global quarantine, the WEF page published an article by Karthik Krishnan, Global CEO of the Britannica Group, entitled «Our education system is losing relevance» in which it is noted that «our Current educational system is based on the model of the Industrial Revolution and focuses on IQ, particularly memorization and normalization; we must update education taking into account preparation for work, the ability to compete against smart machines and the creation of long-term economic value ”. In my opinion, this is the central perspective of capital at the current juncture. To achieve this in the shortest possible time, they are building a «friendly transition» for the powerful sectors, which contains the implementation and dissolution of the educational bubble,

In this sense, the functional narrative for this friendly transition, during the next few years (which may not be many) is that of the home education model + virtuality + digital content + with selective presence. To this end, they are promoting legal frameworks (Home School laws or their equivalents), strengthening the initiative for home reinforcement teachers accompanied by teacher training initiatives for this segment.

   • Bursting of the educational bubble: a scenario that can be anticipated and avoided

A scenario of the bursting of the educational bubble that structurally damages the face-to-face public school is absolutely foreseeable and avoidable. This demands first, an alliance between the organized forces defending the human right to education from a perspective of the world of work, not of capital; In this sense, alliances between unions and guilds of teachers, professors, academics and researchers are essential, to build a Latin American and global fabric of resistance and construction of alternatives. This guild-union alliance must build lasting links and bridges with popular education and critical pedagogical groups, with unions and student organizations, with family federations, and with feminist and anti-racist platforms.

It is about launching a gigantic effort of plural encounter, to avoid a scenario of destruction of the face-to-face public school / university. Therefore, any dispute scenario must be an opportunity to build that fabric.

Naturally, we need to resolve our own epistemic gap and open doors to a new school / university and new school systems that are not at the service of the biopolitical reproduction of the system, but rather build a radically different educational and pedagogical proposal as part of a society of social justice, solidarity, meeting, breaking inequalities, ecological, feminist and anti-racist.

   • How to avoid being reactive deniers and act creatively in building resistance?

By highlighting the convergence of efforts aimed at the bursting of the educational bubble to mortally wound the face-to-face public school , the volume and enveloping nature of the capitalist operation underway can generate feelings of denialist rebellion, which makes it appear impossible to overcome what happens. This is false.

We have to be clear about what we can and cannot change, in order to establish an effective resistance and defense agenda for face-to-face public education. The fourth industrial revolution has arrived and is going to continue and there is an offensive by capital against face-to-face school, we cannot change that. But we have learned in the long history of anti-capitalist educational resistance that in the face of the immeasurable, what must be done is to appropriate the knowledge of each era and build a correlation of forces favorable to the interests of the majority.

Consequently, we must appropriate the technology of the historical moment, detect how it can be useful to generate an emancipatory educational model, denounce what only serves for reproduction of the dominant system and join forces of those of us who fight for the right to education. Guilds, teachers’ unions, student federations, research centers, educators) is) popular and critical pedagogues (as) converging in the defense of public school in a time in which we are obliged to make the virtual-digital in our ally.

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[1]   In my case, I prefer to refer, in practical terms, to the third industrial revolution based on the use of the Unimate robot in the automotive industry.

[2] Derived from Comenio’s proposal

[3] More information about this company on their website https://www.liquid.tech/

[4] Available on  https://luisbonillamolina.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/la-caja-de-bobos-mas-grande-que-pueda-existir-el-metaverso-de-facebook%ef%bf%bc/

[5] The next 2021 ranking figures are estimated in millions of US dollars.

[6] 1.Meeting basic learning needs; 2. Shaping the vision; 3. Universalizing access to education and fostering equity; 4. Focus attention on learning; 7. Strengthen the coordination of actions; 8. Develop support policies; 9. Mobilize resources;

5. Expanding the means and scope of basic education; 6. Improving learning conditions; 10. Strengthening international solidarity

 [7] We have insisted that neoliberal relevance is centered on localism and «local» adaptation to the productive requirements of the market, breaking with the notion of relevance as a dialectic between the global and the local.

 [8] Second Regional Comparative Study in Education

[9] Third Regional Comparative Study in Education

[10] Regional Comparative Study in Education

 [11] Author’s underlining

 [12] Regional Center for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 [13] Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean

[14] For more information on the imposition of the university ranking model read my article: Bonilla-Molina, L (2020) “La crisis sanitaria del covid-19, educación y universidad. Ediciones Otras Voces en educación. Available on https://luisbonillamolina.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/la-crisis-sanitaria-del-covid-19-educacion-y-universidad/  

[15] International Medal for outstanding discoveries in mathematics, awarded by the International Mathematical Community.

[16] Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Caracas, Venezuela.

 [17] Inter-American Development Bank

 [18] The 10 main themes of the conference are: the impact of COVID-19 on higher education, Higher Education and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), inclusion, program quality and relevance, academic mobility, governance, financing, data and knowledge production, international cooperation and the futures of higher education. (IESALC UNESCO website)

 [19] UNESCO (2015). Replantear la educación: ¿hacia un bien común mundial?  UNESCO publishing

[20] Bold type mine

[21] Providing students and teachers with connection equipment, universal Internet access and free use of virtual platforms

[22] Bold type of this article’s author

[23] Derived from Faure, from the contents of the Faure Report.

[24] See Bonilla-Molina, L. (2021) La Nueva fase del Apagón Pedagógico Global (2022-2030 y + allá), Ediciones Otras Voces en Educación. Available on https://luisbonillamolina.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/la-nueva-fase-del-apagon-pedagogico-global-2022-2030-y-alla/

[25] Information and Communication Technologies

 [26] Unesco website

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